GUILFORD — Friends of Music at Guilford presents its third annual Celebration of Women Composers, a benefit fundraiser for its 46th season, on Sunday, April 29, at 7 p.m. in an elegant Brattleboro residence.
Works by Beach, Grant, Daniels, and Branscombe are on the menu, along with hearty hors d'oeuvres served from 6 p.m., and desserts and coffee following the performance.
Three of the four composers represented on the program were contemporaries and friends whose careers were closely linked.
Amy Cheney Beach (1867-1944; she preferred to be known by her married name, Mrs. H.H.A. Beach) was the first American woman composer to achieve success, and remains the most famous and influential. She was born in Henniker, N.H., to a distinguished New England family. As both pianist and composer she was a child prodigy. While she took years of piano instruction, she was largely self-taught as a composer.
She made her name as a piano virtuoso, giving recitals and performing with the Boston Symphony, but after her marriage, her husband insisted she limit her performing career to one annual public charity recital. The serendipitous result (from the perspective of the organizers of this event) is that she devoted herself to composition instead. She was the only female composer associated with the “Second New England School” of Boston-based composers, which included Paine, Foote, Chadwick, MacDowell, and Horatio Parker.
She wrote in the Romantic tradition, though some of her later music has a more modern, harmonically adventurous quality. Her major works include the Mass in E-flat (1892), Gaelic Symphony (1896), and Piano Concerto (1899). Her songs became standard repertory on the vocal recitals of celebrated singers. For this program, pianist William McKim has selected two compositions for solo piano, Opus 54: Scottish Legend and Gavotte Fantastique.
The youngest composer on the program, Elise Grant (born in 1943), lives in Connecticut. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College, Mannes College of Music, and with Nadia Boulanger at her institute in Fontainebleau, France. She lived for several years in France and Switzerland. Her most important work, the opera Santé et Prosperité had its stage premiere in Switzerland and was performed subsequently twice in the United States.
Geneva has heard performances of her orchestral piece La Tempête (Musicals for Puppets), L'inconnu for flute, harp, and two sopranos, and music for the women's chorus Polyhymnia. Her music has also been heard in other Swiss cities, as well as in Sweden and Finland. Grant is a member of Friends of Music at Guilford, which has presented several of her pieces, including her Adagio at last year's Celebration of Women Composers. This year, McKim plays her “Étude: Anger and Nostalgia” for solo piano.
Mabel Wheeler Daniels (1878-1971), like Amy Beach, was a Bostonian, born in Swampscott, Mass., to an old New England family. Both her parents sang in the Handel and Haydn Society chorus.
She attended Radcliffe, where she sang in the Choral Society, of which she became director and for which she composed and conducted two operettas. After graduating magna cum laude, she studied composition first with Chadwick in Boston and later Ludwig Thuille at the Royal Conservatory in Munich, where her attendance broke the gender barrier.
Back in Boston, she joined the chorus of the Cecilia Society. She was actively involved with the MacDowell Colony, where she wrote most of her music. Daniels' best-known works are the orchestral tone poem Deep Forest, and the oratorio The Song of Jael to a poem by her friend Edwin Arlington Robinson. She said of the Three Observations for Three Woodwinds that they were “not to be taken very seriously.” The movements, labelled “Ironic,” “Canonic,” and “Tangonic” (the last a lilting tango), are in a style which may be described as 20th century American lyricism, somewhat like the works of Samuel Barber. The Three Observations will be performed by the Variable Winds trio.
Gena Branscombe (1881-1977) was born in Picton, Ontario, and studied piano and composition at the Chicago Musical College, winning two gold medals in composition.
She taught piano in Chicago and Washington state until 1909, when she went to Europe to further her studies and took composition with Engelbert Humperdinck, best known for his opera Hansel and Gretel. After her marriage in 1910, she and her husband John Ferguson Tenney moved to New York City, where she pursued her musical career and raised four daughters.
Like her colleagues Amy Beach and Mabel Daniels, she was connected with the MacDowell Colony. In 1934 she founded a women's chorus, Branscombe Choral. Among her works are the choral drama Pilgrims of Destiny, several pieces for orchestra, and many for women's voices and orchestra. In 1928, following in Beach's footsteps, she became president of the Society of American Woman Composers.
The Gena Branscombe Project is a one-woman show by soprano Kathleen Shimeta, in which songs by Branscombe are bracketed with first-person dialogue. Shimeta has appeared as soloist with many orchestras and as a recitalist at Merkin Hall in New York City, the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, and many universities. She has recorded a Branscombe collection for Albany Records.
At this year's Celebration of Women Composers Shimeta will perform selections from the show, accompanied by pianist Julia Bady of Greenfield, Mass., who appeared earlier this season at a Friends of Music house concert with tenor Irwin Reese.
Seating for this event is limited. Recommended donation is $35 per person. Note that donations of support in any amount for this 46th season benefit are welcome from people unable to attend the performance. For further information and an official invitation packet, call the Friends of Music office at 802-254-3600.